March Madness 1939

On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler’s panzers smashed into Poland. Two days later, an anguished Neville Chamberlain declared war, the most awful war in all of history.

Was the war inevitable? No. No war is inevitable until it has begun. Was it a necessary war? Hearken to Churchill:

“One day, President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, ‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world … .”

But if the war need not have happened, what caused it?

Let us go back to Munich.

On Sept. 30, 1938, at Munich, Chamberlain signed away the Sudetenland rather than fight to keep 3.5 million Germans under a Czech rule imposed upon them at the Paris peace conference in violation of Wilson’s principle of self-determination.

Why did Britain not fight?

Because Britain had no alliance with Prague and Chamberlain did not “give two hoots” who ruled the Sudetenland. Also, Britain had no draft, no divisions to send to France, no Spitfires, no support from America or her dominions, no ally save France, who had been told that, if war came, the United States would not deliver the planes France had purchased.

U.S. neutrality laws forbade it.

In his meetings with Chamberlain, Hitler had warned that Poland and Hungary would also be entering claims for ancestral lands ceded to the Czechs at Paris in 1919.

Thus, after Munich, Warsaw had seized coal-rich Teschen, which held tens of thousands of Poles. Hungary, in the “Vienna Award” of Nov. 2, 1938, got back lands in Slovakia and Ruthenia where Hungarians were the majority and Budapest had ruled before 1919.

Neither Britain nor France resisted these border revisions.

Came then March 1939, when Czechoslovakia began to crumble.

On March 10, to crush a Slovakian push for independence, Czech President Emil Hacha ousted Slovak Prime Minister Father Tiso, occupied Bratislava and installed a pro-Prague regime.

On March 11, Tiso fled to Vienna and appealed to Berlin.

On March 13, Tiso met Hitler, who told him that if he did not declare independence immediately, Germany would not interfere with Hungary’s re-annexation of Slovakia. Budapest was moving troops to the border.

On March 14, Slovakia declared independence. Ruthenia followed, dissolving what was left of Czechoslovakia.

Adm. Horthy, told by Hitler he could re-annex Ruthenia but must keep his hands off Slovakia, occupied Ruthenia.

Hacha now asked to meet with Hitler to get the same guarantee of independence Slovakia had gotten.
But Hitler bullied Hacha into making the Czech remnant a protectorate of Germany.

Thus, six months after Munich, the Germans of Czechoslovakia were where they wished to be, under German rule. The Poles were under Polish rule. The Hungarians were under Hungarian rule. And the Slovaks were under Slovak rule in their new nation.

But 500,000 Ruthenians were back under Budapest, and 7 million Czechs were back under German rule — this time Berlin, not Vienna.

Ethnonationalism had torn Czechoslovakia apart as it had the parent Hapsburg Empire. Yet, no vital British interest was imperiled.

And though Hitler had used brutal Bismarckian diplomacy, not force, Chamberlain was humiliated. The altarpiece of his career, the Munich accord, was now an object of mockery.

Made a fool of by Hitler, baited by his backbenchers, goaded by Lord Halifax, facing a vote of no confidence, on March 31, 1939, Chamberlain made the greatest blunder in British diplomatic history. He handed an unsolicited war guarantee to the Polish colonels who had just bitten off a chunk of Czechoslovakia.

Lunacy, raged Lloyd George, who was echoed by British leaders and almost every historian since.

With the British Empire behind it, Warsaw now refused even to discuss a return of Danzig, the Baltic town, 95 percent German, which even Chamberlain thought should be returned.

Hitler did not want a war with Poland. Had he wanted war, he would have demanded the return of the entire Polish Corridor taken from Germany in 1919. He wanted Danzig back and Poland as an ally in his anti-Comintern Pact. Nor did he want war with a Britain he admired and always saw as a natural ally.

Nor did he want war with France, or he would have demanded the return of Alsace.

But Hitler was out on a limb with Danzig and could not crawl back.

Repeatedly, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. Repeatedly, the Poles rebuffed him. Seeing the Allies courting Josef Stalin, Hitler decided to cut his own deal with the detested Bolsheviks and settle the Polish issue by force.

Though Britain had no plans to aid Poland, no intention of aiding Poland and would do nothing to aid Poland — Churchill would cede half that nation to Stalin and the other half to Stalin’s stooges — Britain declared war for Poland.

The most awful war in all of history followed, which would bankrupt Britain, bring down her empire and bring Stalin’s Red Army into Prague, Berlin and Vienna. But Hitler was dead and Germany in ashes.

If Obama sends warmongers like Pearlman and Rum out for a tour of clearing minefields in some Godforsaken part of the Third World he’ll provide a great service to humanity. If the two keyboard warriors manage to return alive I predict their enthusiasm for mass murder will be much diminished.

Of course it could be that their comments result from being unable to read or think.

No, he just wanted Danzig. As he proved when, having taken Danzig back in 1939, he immediately renounced the use of force and… oh.

I think I’ve spotted the flaw at the heart of your theory, Pat. Fist-bumps, though. I thought the time was long past when defenders of Hitler would trot out the “He only had limted territorial ambitions” line. Nice to see that, for some, it’s always August 1939.

And then of course there was the little trans-national issue of annihilating the Jewish race and subjugating the inferior sub-human Slavs as slave labor. I mean why go to war over something trivial like that?

And I’m sure Hitler would have been a real pal once the Nazis had perfected the jet airplane and developed an atomic bomb.

Rum raisin is right, Hitler would not have stopped at Danzig. But that’s not comprehensive. And neither is what seems the indisputable fact that he would have continued on to the Soviet Union; the man simply would have considered himself an utter failure if he had not tried to gain the lebensraum he talked about almost incessantly. Everything else for him, the Sudeten, the Czecho thing, the Anschluss with Austria, Danzig, Poland, and even war with France and GB were either sideshows for the man, bon bons, or simply obstacles he tried to avoid but would not let deter him in any event. The man’s eyes were always on the East.

The question from there however is whether even a war between Hitler and the Soviet Union would have involved such vital British and/or American interests to justify war, and I say no, not just that war itself. However, what would have done so for me would be if, after that war had started, either side started winning all the marbles. A Europe at the time dominated either by Stalin or Hitler would certainly have put Britain out on a limb, and denied America of a strong Britain as an ally and that would have been disaster. Much better that Stalin and Hitler had fought each other to the point that the war just left both exhausted and weak, and subject to being defeated further by politics and diplomacy and etc. in Western Europe at least.

A Europe dominated by either the Soviets or the Nazis however would have been a catastrophe for the U.S., especially given Imperial Japan sitting on her other side. Even though Stalin was a “communism in one country” man, he knew opportunities when they presented themselves and the U.S. caught in a vice was one. And Hitler always identified the U.S. as embodying the precise polar opposite of his Reich and was heard to say on more than one occasion that eventually war with the U.S. was inevitable. And of course there was no reason other than such a visceral hatred and feeling of inevitability that caused him to declare war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor.

But, to get back to Buchanan’s point, At some point Hitler would have attacked Stalin and thus whether it was a necessary war or not depends on how one sees that war going. I suspect Hitler would have crushed Stalin and the Bolshies and then we’d have had to fight a much stronger Hitler eventually, a Hitler with all the resources of both Europe and lots of Asia on his side, such as oil from the Crimea and you name it all.

Ergo, in my view, better that we fought him when we did, and indeed too bad we didn’t fight him earlier.

And then of course there was the little trans-national issue of annihilating the Jewish race and subjugating the inferior sub-human Slavs as slave labor. I mean why go to war over something trivial like that?
The first is a post facto rationalization, by decades, the second is ridiculous. The Allies didn’t go to war to save Jews, and even less to save Slavs, whom Stalin himself was doing a capital job of treating as inferior sub-human slave labor without any help at all.

“annihilating the Jewish race and subjugating the inferior sub-human Slavs as slave labor.”

I don’t think that HItler had any real ambition to do these things before 1941. If he had, why was so much of the Nazi policy geared towards encouraging Jews to leave areas under Nazi control? The roadblocks to Jews LEAVING areas controlled by Nazis were not German, rather they were British, American and Russian refugee and immigration policy.

Has anybody who’s commented here actually read the book? If so, do you have any academic objections to the facts or conclusions in the book, such as contradictions with other sources or unsupported conclusions?

I’m sure the reason PJB wrote it was not purely scholarly interest, and it may be that– like many amateur historical writers– his work is colored by a common bias towards connecting a historical narrative with current events. So… is it not still worth reading with an open mind?

I haven’t read anything about the book that leads me to believe that Hitler comes off smelling like roses. But it sounds like, for many people, it’s still too soon to investigate the possibility that the worse conflict in history was as much the doing of the doing of the goods guys as the bad.

And the Japanese??? Should we have just let them invade the rest of the world, which they were well on their way to doing, and subsequently wear them out after warring for the whole world against whomever won the Hitler/Stalin war – like some Final Four tournament? This whole argument/essay/theory is ridiculous.

I have read the book, Jack. The weakest part is its (non)treatment of the Holocaust. The story of which, I think, OVERWHELMS any and every other consideration related to the war. That is to say, if a state was capable of carrying out the premeditated killing of x million Jews, then it must be a purely evil and depraved entity, and ANY excuse to go to war against it seems justified. What Buchanan suggests, but doesn’t explore, is whether Hitler somehow could have been dissuaded from his most nefarious acts through…through appeasment, I guess. Or through negotiation…i.e., could there actually have been some kind of deal to ship Polish and other east European Jews to Madagascar or Palestine or America? Or to come to some sort of German accomodation with England along the lines that the anglophile Hitler supposedly sought well into the late thirties?

Similarly, could there have been some scenario short of utter defeat and disempowerment of the Hutus of Rwanda that would have dissuaded them from committing their beatial acts?

If someone goes completely beserk and commits unspeakable acts, is it therefore INEVITABLE that he would act in this way under other circumstances?

Fran,

There is lots of evidence that the Japanese wanted to dominate Asia and end the U.S. oil embargo to Japan. Any evidence they wanted to “take over the world”?

It’s a little funny reading the comments here that are in the nature of “Hitler (or the Japanese) were bad guys of *course* we should have fought same.” I.e., divorced apparently from any consideration of national interest whatsoever, we somehow have the obligation to go a-warring against bad guys in general. Presumably then we fell down on the job not going to war against Stalin—and oh yeah, Lenin before him—and Mao too, and that adventure against Saddam was dandy, and, pace Newt, we ought now be carpet bombing North Korea, and let’s see how about Sudan and ….

Moreover, just in terms of WWII, as someone else here noted it’s so ahistorical to believe that the U.S. was always certain to win that engagement.

As per my previous post I disagree with Buchanan’s thesis and think war with Hitler was inevitable and inevitably necessary, but regardless Buchanan still has a helluva big valid point about the foolishness of Great Britain committing itself to defend what it couldn’t, Danzig and Poland. Think of the British and French and American lives that could have been saved if we’d have better picked when to fight Hitler and, say, started after Barbarossa when he had to extend himself so much into the Soviet Union. Now *that* would have been thinking to have let him pour the vast majority of his forces Eastward first and *then* gone after him from the West.

I.e., while one can disagree with Buchanan’s specifics, his general point is simply that just like in every other realm of human endeavor, in war and conflict ideas—and thinking—matters.

To a true American patriot, Germany should be just one of many European countries, deserving no more sympathy than, say, France or Spain. Was there a year when Buchanan did not complain about Versailles or 1939? No. Doesn’t that make him a patriot of more than one country?